Aligning execution with strategy

Initiatives

Performance doesn’t improve itself. Performance only improves as a result of action. Initiatives are that action – planned activity designed to address existing issues and move your organisation towards the achievement of your Objectives. Initiatives in SAP Strategy Management move those activities centre stage to provide transparency and insight , instead of being hidden in separate silos.

Initiatives can be grouped or filtered by categories and cascaded down the organisation hierarchy consistently linked to the Objectives they support.

Comprised of initiative management and prioritisation modules, SAP Strategy Management’s initiatives tab goes beyond simply tracking project resources and activities to help stakeholders prioritise and focus resources appropriately — even in the face of conflicting tasks — so that resources support the milestones most critical to organisational goals. Rooted in the knowledge that ownership fosters productivity, the initiative management module provides simple-to-digest summary views of initiatives supporting overall objectives, as well as the milestones supporting each initiative, interdependencies between them, and schedule and budget status.

Key features and benefits

Initiative summary: Provides an at-a-glance summary on the status of multiple initiatives and how they impact performance at the strategic level. Create transparency into activity so that participants have a clear understanding of the part they play in achievement.

Unique initiatives prioritisation matrix: Helps ensure that stakeholders organisation-wide are focusing on the right work to support organisational goals, by providing an at-a-glance view of initiatives’ relative importance and urgency, plus dependencies between individual initiatives and/or milestones. Highlight areas where conflicting priorities or overload of personnel risk jeopardising on-time task completion.

Fishbone visualisations: Provides an intuitive overview of critical interdependencies between milestones to better understand and resolve bottlenecks within an initiative.

Impact and Gantt chart visualisations show the progress of activity optionally including a developing performance of a selected KPI.

Filter initiatives by specific characteristics: Limits display of initiatives by specific properties such as Initiative type, owner, budget or schedule status, focusing attention on those initiatives which are directly actionable by one individual or that demand immediate attention.

Initiatives notification: Keeps initiatives moving forward by notifying team members when they are assigned a related task. Distribute ownership of initiatives: Distributing ownership across multiple people — including different owners for the overall initiative, associated milestones and sub-milestones — promotes effective collaboration and accountability.

Cascade across the organisation: Create multiple linked Initiatives across the organisation in one go so that each is relevant in its location and assign budgets across these linked activities.